4 ms·

Any plans to support Asian languages?

wkrause13 9y ago
The short answer is no, because I don't know enough about those languages to deliver a valuable experience. I think the value from Langliter comes from two areas: 1. The NLP processing and tooling built on top of that processing 2. Its superior mobile experience If I just used a simple form of tokenization, I think I could very quickly deliver a superior mobile experience than what is currently available from similar apps. However, I'm not sure if PoS tagging and some of the other techniques I'm using translate to those languages or if they do, how much value they'd add to the learning process. But it's something I'll certainly revisit if the app ends up being popular and I have the resources to do it properly.
- meric 9y ago
  Awesome work! I am learning a language and have been fantasising about a tool like this. What about support of non-latin alphabet languages? I'm learning Dari at the moment. It uses Arabic alphabets, the words are a string of alphabets, there is tenses, verbs, nouns, adjectives. It's different to English only by the alphabet used, the vocabulary and the ordering of the verbs/nouns/subject. Is it possible for it to be opened up to third parties to contribute new languages?
  - wkrause 9y ago
    It's definitely something I hope to get to explore. Langliter is only a side project at the moment, so I'm focusing on languages that I have a little experience with. But as long as the licensing is compatible, I've built Langliter to be pretty flexible in terms of the types of tags it could support.
- malloryerik 9y ago
  This is a great tool! Can I ask what kind of database and backend setup you're using? Do you choose articles, then run nlp over them? How do you get dictionary results? I really like being able to quickly and easily tag words for learning. Thanks. I'm a polyglot and completely relate to the premise of your app and system. I used the iOS version but an curious, are these native? React Native?
  - wkrause 9y ago
    I'm running it on Google Container Engine, Go for the main API layer and CockroachDB for the DB. I actually have a blog post in the works for why I chose CockroachDB. The tl;dr Langliter is offline first so most of the data is synced in the background. Therefore some additional latency makes no real difference and the resilience of a CockroachDB cluster is really impressive. And good eye, it is React Native app. I should probably look into following platform style guides eventually ( I wouldn't count UI design as a real strength on mine :-) )
- tnova 9y ago
  At least, as far as Korean is concerned, there is a version of the Penn Treebank for Korean: https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=ircs_reports https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102... And of course there are the Universal POS tags, although I'm not sure if they are precise enough for your intended purpose.
- cinquemb 9y ago
  Well if you ever get a chance to do this for Indonesian (uses the roman alphabet), I'll deff use the app or at least be willing to try. As someone living in Indonesia for about two years who has tried other apps, buying grade school books, nothing is interesting to me once the novelty wears off, and my incentives for learning more than navigational stuff and greetings is pretty much nil.
anken 9y ago
I am currently working on a project that lets you paste any chinese text coming from any source (for me it's mostly from news media and wechat moments), and provides you the translation, automated reading, word-by-word translation, and allows you to select words to memorize by a spaced repetition system. For me the real deal is in the memorize function that gives you a word plus a sentence coming from your collection of text to get some context. You get the same word-by-word translation on the sentence, you can play it out, you are not only working on your words but discovering new words from the sentences and improving your listening comprehension.

The short answer is no, because I don't know enough about those languages to deliver a valuable experience. I think the value from Langliter comes from two areas: 1. The NLP processing and tooling built on top of that processing 2. Its superior mobile experience If I just used a simple form of tokenization, I think I could very quickly deliver a superior mobile experience than what is currently available from similar apps. However, I'm not sure if PoS tagging and some of the other techniques I'm using translate to those languages or if they do, how much value they'd add to the learning process. But it's something I'll certainly revisit if the app ends up being popular and I have the resources to do it properly.

meric 9y ago
Awesome work! I am learning a language and have been fantasising about a tool like this. What about support of non-latin alphabet languages? I'm learning Dari at the moment. It uses Arabic alphabets, the words are a string of alphabets, there is tenses, verbs, nouns, adjectives. It's different to English only by the alphabet used, the vocabulary and the ordering of the verbs/nouns/subject. Is it possible for it to be opened up to third parties to contribute new languages?
- wkrause 9y ago
  It's definitely something I hope to get to explore. Langliter is only a side project at the moment, so I'm focusing on languages that I have a little experience with. But as long as the licensing is compatible, I've built Langliter to be pretty flexible in terms of the types of tags it could support.
malloryerik 9y ago
This is a great tool! Can I ask what kind of database and backend setup you're using? Do you choose articles, then run nlp over them? How do you get dictionary results? I really like being able to quickly and easily tag words for learning. Thanks. I'm a polyglot and completely relate to the premise of your app and system. I used the iOS version but an curious, are these native? React Native?
- wkrause 9y ago
  I'm running it on Google Container Engine, Go for the main API layer and CockroachDB for the DB. I actually have a blog post in the works for why I chose CockroachDB. The tl;dr Langliter is offline first so most of the data is synced in the background. Therefore some additional latency makes no real difference and the resilience of a CockroachDB cluster is really impressive. And good eye, it is React Native app. I should probably look into following platform style guides eventually ( I wouldn't count UI design as a real strength on mine :-) )
tnova 9y ago
At least, as far as Korean is concerned, there is a version of the Penn Treebank for Korean: https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=ircs_reports https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102... And of course there are the Universal POS tags, although I'm not sure if they are precise enough for your intended purpose.
cinquemb 9y ago
Well if you ever get a chance to do this for Indonesian (uses the roman alphabet), I'll deff use the app or at least be willing to try. As someone living in Indonesia for about two years who has tried other apps, buying grade school books, nothing is interesting to me once the novelty wears off, and my incentives for learning more than navigational stuff and greetings is pretty much nil.

anken 9y ago

I am currently working on a project that lets you paste any chinese text coming from any source (for me it's mostly from news media and wechat moments), and provides you the translation, automated reading, word-by-word translation, and allows you to select words to memorize by a spaced repetition system. For me the real deal is in the memorize function that gives you a word plus a sentence coming from your collection of text to get some context. You get the same word-by-word translation on the sentence, you can play it out, you are not only working on your words but discovering new words from the sentences and improving your listening comprehension.